Åshild Kolås

Research Professor

Research Interests

Currently working on identity politics and representation, gender, peacebuilding and conflict management, insurgencies and ethnic movements, governance and sovereignty contestations.

Background

Bio: Åshild Kolås is a social anthropologist and Research Professor at PRIO. She was the head of PRIOs Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Program from 2005 to 2011. Her core research interests are ethnicity, identity politics and peacebuilding. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities in India and China, and has written on Tibet, Nepal, Inner Mongolia and Northeast India with a focus on governance and governmentality, identity politics, discourse and representation. Her latest books are Basque Nationhood. Towards a Democratic Scenario (Peter Lang, 2016, co-edited with Pedro Ibarra Güell) and Reclaiming the Forest. The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya (Berghahn, 2015, co-edited with Yuanyuan Xie). She is also the author of Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition. A Place Called Shangrila (Routledge, 2008) and On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier (University of Washington Press, 2005; 2015, with Monika P. Thowsen). Since 2006, Åshild Kolås has coordinated an institutional cooperation between PRIO and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi. Her current research is on gender, peacebuilding and conflict management in Northeast India and Myanmar. She is a member of the editorial board of Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.

Related pages

Independent – International – Interdisciplinary

The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) conducts research on the conditions for peaceful relations between states, groups and people.